Flooding is the most common and costly natural disaster in the U.S., significantly affecting homes, businesses, infrastructure, and the environment. Since 2000, flood-related disasters in the U.S. accounted for more than $850 billion in damage and losses.
Pew aims to reduce these impacts by improving policies and planning at the federal and state levels to:
Enhance pre-disaster mitigation: Directing more resources toward and increasing the use of proactive approaches, such as removing properties from flood-prone areas, increasing green space, and restoring and protecting flood plains, will limit the effects and cost of floods.
Ensure infrastructure is flood-ready: Updating the nation’s roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure to better withstand future flood events will help improve community resilience and reduce taxpayer losses.
Establish flood-resilient states: Systematic planning and adoption of nature-based solutions to address flood risks will reduce the severity of floods, boost states’ ability to withstand future storms, and lower disaster costs.
Modernize federal flood insurance: Reforming the National Flood Insurance Program to reflect current and future threats; remove incentives for development in flood-prone areas; and break the costly cycle of flooding, damage, and repair will help the program better meet its goals of lowering federal spending on disaster response and rebuilding.
To ensure communities prepare for, recover from, and build resilience to natural disasters, officials at all levels of government must coordinate effectively—which is far easier said than done. To help identify and alleviate challenges to that collaboration, The Pew Charitable Trusts hosted a two-day event for federal and state resilience experts and commissioned an in-depth analysis from Council Oak, a Washington-based public policy consulting firm, to further explore how to break down barriers among state and federal agencies that inhibit disaster resilience efforts.
Flood-related disasters have cost the United States more than $900 billion in damage and economic losses since 2000 and have affected every state. Experts expect future flood events to be more prevalent and severe, challenging all levels of government to manage increasingly devastating impacts.
Each year across the United States, communities large and small, inland and coastal, face devastation from flooding.
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